The Chronology of Water. Lidia Yuknavitch

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ already wanted her to sit by me.

      There was more. Chuck told us that some really famous edgy writer-I didn’t recognize her name, but I pretended that I did-had given a talk at a conference about the State of Sex Scenes in Literature and she’d said that all sex scenes were shit, except for the sex written by Lidia Yuknavitch. Maybe Chuck didn’t tell us that. But someone in the group did. I don’t remember. I think I was still thinking about the stripper thing. Areal-life ex-stripper in our writing group! So glamorous.

      Yes, we said, invite her. Please.

      She showed up a few weeks later, wearing a long black coat. I couldn’t see her breasts. She was quiet. She didn’t make eye contact. She did not sound like she was from Texas.

      Frankly, I was a little disappointed.

      Where was the big hair, the Lucite platform heels? The track marks?

      Had Chuck made the whole thing up? (He does that sometimes.)

      How was he describing me to people?

      Lidia had pages. That first night she came. She shared work. If you are a writer, or really a human at all, you will recognize how terrifying this is. You show up and sit down with a group of strangers and share your art, having no idea how they will respond, these assholes marking up your pages with their pens, judging you, leering at your tits.

      She read us the first chapter of her novel The Small Backs of Children (due out with Hawthorne Books next year), while we all followed along with the copies she’d passed out. They say that alcoholics remember their first drink, that lightening feeling in your body that says yes-yes-let’s-feel-this-way-all-thetime -well, I will always remember the first time I heard Lidia Yuknavitch read.

      I thought, this is how writing is supposed to be. I thought, man oh man, she’s good. I thought, I want that.

      Literally. I wanted that chapter.

      See the protocol at workshop is that we bring in pages, hand them out, read them out loud, and then go around the table for comments. After that, we collect the pages, which by then are theoretically covered with highly useful notes. Work does not leave the room. We never take home anyone’s pages. They don’t let scientists take home uranium in their pockets after a day at Los Alamos. That’s the deal.

      But I wanted that chapter. I wanted to take it home so I could read it again and again. I’d never felt like that about anyone else’s work, ever.

      I considered stealing it.

      I could pretend to put it in the stack as the pages were collected, but then palm it off the table onto my lap and slip it onto the floor into my open purse. I didn’t want to ask her for it. She already thought we were all perverts, the way we kept checking out her chest.

      I decided to play it cool. We went around the table, all of us giving feedback, happy, exhausted, delighted that she didn’t suck.

      I tried not to blather, counting on the fact that there would be more, more writing, more Lidia.

      It worked. She came back. The next week. Amazing!

      She workshopped that book, and this memoir. And the more I’ve learned about her, the more in awe I am.

      To start, she isn’t really from Texas. She just went to college there, which is a totally different thing. She does have nice knockers. For the other stuff, you’ll have to read the book.

      I’m just looking forward to getting a copy I can keep.

      Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -

      - EMILY DICKINSON

      Happiness? Happiness makes crappy stories.

      - KEN KESEY

      Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

      -JOHN KEATS

       I. Holding Breath

       The Chronology of Water

      THE DAY MY DAUGHTER WAS STILLBORN, AFTER I HELD the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who could not bear to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge. She guided me to a special shower. The shower had a chair and the spray came down lightly, warm. She said, That feels good, doesn’t it. The water. She said, you are still bleeding quite a bit. Just let it. Ripped from vagina to rectum, sewn closed. Falling water on a body.

      I sat on the stool and closed the little plastic curtain. I could hear her humming. I bled, I cried, I peed, and vomited. I became water.

      Finally she had to come back inside and “Save me from drowning in there.” It was a joke. It made me smile.

      Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. They swell and dive in and out between great sinkholes of the brain. It’s hard to know what to think of a life when you find yourself knee-deep. You want to climb out, you want to explain how there must be some mistake. You the swimmer, after all. And then you see the waves without pattern, scooping up everyone, throwing them around like so many floating heads, and you can only laugh in your sobbing at all the silly head bobbers. Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief.

      When we first found out the life in me was dead, I was told the best thing to do was deliver vaginally anyway. It would keep my body as strong and healthy for the future as possible. My womb. My uterus. My vaginal canal. Since I had been struck dumb with grief, I did what they said.

      Labor lasted 38 hours. When your baby isn’t moving inside you, the normal process is stalled. Nothing moved my child within. Not hours and hours of a Pitocin drip. Not my first husband who fell asleep during his shift with me - not my sister coming in and nearly yanking him out by his hair.

      In the thick of it I would sit on the edge of the bed and my sister would hold me by the shoulders and when the pain came she would draw me into her body and say “ Yes. Breathe.” I felt a strength I never saw in her again. I felt the strength surge of mother from my sister.

      That kind of pain for that long exhausts a body. Even 25 years of swimming wasn’t enough.

      When she finally came, little dead girlfish, they placed her on my chest just like an alive baby.

      I kissed her and held her and talked to her just like just like an alive baby.

      Her eyelashes so long.

      Her cheeks still red. How, I don’t know. I thought they would be blue.

      Her lips a rosebud.

      When they finally took her away from me, the last cogent thought I had, a thoughtlessness that would last months: So this is death. Then a death life is what I choose.

      When they brought me home from the hospital I entered a strange place. I could hear them СКАЧАТЬ